The elegy originated in ancient Greece, where the "elegiac meter" was employed by poets to express their personal emotions. The elegiac meter or "couplet" utilized one hexameter line (six metrical feet) combined with one pentameter line (five metrical feet). Surprisingly, early Greek poets using this form usually wrote above love, not death. However, the foundation for elegies being poems of mourning was always there: the Greek word elegos (ἔλεγος) referred to both the aforementioned formal structure and a mournful song sung to the accompaniment of a wind instrument. The form was picked up by Roman poets, including Theocritus and Ovid, who used it to express an even wider range of emotions.
Early elegies birthed the "pastoral elegy," a new elegiac form appearing in the second and third centuries that blended the Greek and Roman styles. Critical elements of the pastoral elegy include an idyllic rural setting, shepherds, death, and a procession of mourners. The Ancient Greek poet Bion wrote one of the most important pastoral elegies, the "Lament for Adonis," which helped to advance the new form. Classical pastoral elegies, such as Bion's, were instrumental in inspiring later poets, such as John Milton and Percey Shelly, who produced their own works of pastoral elegy. Milton wrote the pastoral elegy "Lycidas" in 1637 for his friend Edward King, and Shelley wrote "Adonaïs" in 1821 for the poet John Keats.
By the sixteenth century, the elegy itself was used in a more narrow sense, to mourn the death of a specific person or to reflect on human death in general. Baxter's "Elegy for my Father's Father" achieves both these purposes. The modern elegy has three sections, which have been compared to three stages of mourning: lament, praise and admiration, and finally consolation and solace. This model can be roughly applied to "Elegy for my Father's Father," with lines 1 through 11 being lament, lines 12 through 27 being praise and admiration, and lines 28 through 38 showing consolation and solace.
Today, elegies are a flexible form used by poets to express their emotions (or, as Baxter might say, to "let their hearts speak") about death. Relatively modern poets, including Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, and Czeslaw Milosz, not to mention countless other poets, have all produced thoughtful and heartfelt elegies that speak to their innermost feelings. Because the elegy targets such a universal topic as death, it will probably always remain one of the most essential and ubiquitous poetic forms.
